


Properata Retexite Fata

by annecoulmanross



Category: The Terror (TV 2018), The Terror - Dan Simmons
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Caves, F/M, First Kiss, Fluff, Ghosts, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Inspired by Orpheus and Eurydice (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Love Confessions, M/M, Mild Horror, Orpheus & Eurydice AU, Post-Canon, Suicidal Ideation, Tenderness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-17
Updated: 2020-09-17
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:54:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26511727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/annecoulmanross/pseuds/annecoulmanross
Summary: Twelve years after Francis Crozier disappeared into a maze of Arctic ice, James Clark Ross receives another devastating loss: the death of his beloved wife Anne. In an act of desperate grief, James then embarks on one last rescue mission to search for his missing friend, but James has no idea what lies ahead, or what challenges he’ll have to endure if he wants any chance of saving the man he loves.A Rossier story inspired by the Greek myth of Orpheus & Eurydice.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Sir James Clark Ross, Lady Ann Ross/Sir James Clark Ross
Comments: 13
Kudos: 14
Collections: The Two Captains Fest 2020





	Properata Retexite Fata

**Author's Note:**

  * For [handfuloftime](https://archiveofourown.org/users/handfuloftime/gifts).



> _Properata Retexite Fata,_ or, “Unravel Their Too-Hasty Fates,” is a line from the Orpheus & Eurydice episode of the _Metamorphoses_ of the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (Book X, line 31.)
> 
> The flourishes that separate out each of the sections are actually handwriting from an Italian medieval manuscript of the _Metamorphoses_ called the [Neapolitan Ovid](https://wdl.org/en/item/4524/) (c.1000-1200 CE). The four lines are appearing here are: _nec felix attulit omen_ (line 5) – “it brought forth no fortunate omen,” _exitus auspicio gravior_ (line 8) – “a departure worse than any could predict,” _oro properata retexite fata_ (line 31) – “I beg you to unravel their too-hasty fates,” and _flexit amans oculos_ (line 57) – “he, loving, turned his gaze back.” 
> 
> **For Henry @[handfuloftime](https://handfuloftime.tumblr.com) – an Orpheus and Eurydice AU**
> 
> Henry, I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it – this was an absolutely perfect prompt, and it felt very self-indulgent to have this chance to play with both classical references and underworld imagery: two of my favorite things! 
> 
> This fic also has a playlist that you can listen to [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2JslOk70ajyre0p634i2aq?si=0Ro7w-SMQZ2jnAFARfIKgg).

# – I –

#### February of 1857

–––––––––––––––––

From caves of ice and fields of snow  
The breath of night like death did flow  
Beneath the sinking moon

– from “The Cold Earth Slept Below” (1823) by Percy Bysshe Shelley

–––––––––––––––––

_“I wish to be buried by the side of my beloved wife,”_ Sir James Clark Ross’s pen scratched across the paper, almost angrily, as though he were writing an irate letter to the Admiralty – to which they might even deign to listen – rather than this fruitless postscript, which could not bring James to the grave any sooner than his time, however earnestly he might wish it.

Still, James wrote on, his handwriting made even more illegible by grief and frustration. _“If there be not room there, my coffin might rest on hers as the grave is purposely dug of sufficient depth….”_

The sudden sound of children playing outside in the snow made James’s heart sink. A laugh rang out – that would be six-year-old Thomas, too young to yet understand what had happened, that his mother wouldn’t be returning. James had tried to explain to Thomas that this wasn’t like when his father and his eldest brother would go off to London and come back with gifts and stories. Anne wouldn’t be returning, not this time, he’d said, and Thomas had looked up at him with mournful blue eyes so much like Anne’s and James had broken apart and left the room, abandoning the whole affair for young James to explain to Thomas instead. It was too much.

It was all far, far too much.

_“… and thus our dust may mingle in the grave, while our souls rejoice together in glory everlasting.”_

James put down his pen, noticing that both of his hands ached, though only his right hand had any reason to do so. The pain in his hands had grown worse lately, James thought. A sign of time passing more quickly than ever – water running out of his cupped hands. James sighed and wished fleetingly that the earth would simply swallow him up in silent, merciful darkness at that very moment. Instead, he wandered to the window and looked out toward the grounds where the children were playing. Young Thomas and young James were, indeed, making mischief out in the snow; Thomas screamed in joy and terror as his elder brother aimed a snowball his way.

It was good that young James was distracting himself, James thought. The boy was still only twelve years old himself – too young to shoulder all of his father’s grief at all times, on top of his own.

Nearer to the house, young Annie was curled up on a bench, reading, in apparent defiance of the cold. James wondered why his daughter would not simply join him inside. _Had he been such terrible company as to drive his own child out into the snow?_ Probably so. If James were honest with himself, he was drunk more often than not, now. His hands shook worse than ever.

James was interrupted in his self-condemnation by the appearance of dear old Edward Bird, trekking out of the grove and up through the snow up to where Annie sat with her book.

Bird, a faithful friend and former Third of James’s, had been staying with them these last weeks while James made arrangements. It was a blessing – the man had been close to the family since James was first married, and understood something of James’s compounding sorrows: losing Anne on top of the agonizing years of waiting and wondering about…

After all, Edward Bird had been a friend to Francis Crozier too. Bird had known Sir John Franklin in Hobart, also, same as he. He had sent the two of them off from Greenhithe almost twelve years ago with as many well-wishes and high-hopes as James Ross had.

And now, what a ruin it all was.

James sighed. He saw that Edward Bird was kneeling beside Annie’s bench, carefully holding up a white flower, its long, curling petals encased in a thin tracery of ice, while Annie flipped through her book and pointed excitedly at a page. Edward nodded, and Annie opened up what James realized was her mother’s sketchbook, which the two of them had been working on together before Anne got sick. James watched as Annie began to sketch the blossom that Edward still held aloft for her, smiling gently as she bit her tongue in concentration.

Annie then pulled out a piece of thick card stock from the back of the sketchbook – and James, heartbroken, realized that it was one of Francis’s specimens from so very long ago, on their trips with Parry. An Arctic flower, pressed into paper and preserved, annotated in Francis’s careful hand.

Edward Bird must have known it too – he’d consulted with Francis and with Dr. Hooker on their specimens in the Falklands – but his smile never wavered as he spoke quietly with Annie, every other word making its way to James, who now slid down behind the drapes lest he be seen. Still, he caught Edward speaking of Annie’s careful rendering of a petal, the shape of a leaf, how very much like her mother’s work it was. Francis had once said as much to Anne, while James had looked on and smiled, heart too full…

Hearing Edward complimenting Annie on her excellent scientific illustration was the thing that finally brought the tears spilling over onto James’s cheeks. This man – this dear friend – was a better father to James’s daughter than James was. What use was James, alive, if he could not even be there for his children? Better they be with kind, generous Edward than suffer under a neglectful widower of a parent.

He would have been better off remaining in the Arctic past all hope. If he could not have saved his Anne, he could at least have saved Francis. Or at least brought Francis’s bones home.

In a fleeting, horrid thought, James imagined crawling out across the ice and rock and being buried beside Francis instead. It would be something. Whether penance or comfort, James didn’t know.

James bowed his head in his hands. He couldn’t go on like this.

Better to end it once and for all – better to go back, and hope it finally killed him this time. _Would they take him home to be with Anne? Would he be placed somewhere near where Francis had once laid down his head?_ Either would serve well enough.

James set aside the last page he had written, grimacing at how a teardrop had smeared some of the words, since he had been too distracted to blot the ink.

Still – early in the year though it was, this work would have to be begun now, if James Ross intended to join a ship heading west with the coming season. So James set aside his grief and allowed the desperation to rise within him again and harden into resolve, as he picked up a fresh sheet of paper and started to pen a letter.

# – II –

#### April of 1857

–––––––––––––––––

But hush!–am I dreaming a poem of Hades, Heaven, Justice? Not I;  
I began too far off, in my proem, with what men believe and deny.

– from “Summing Up in Italy,” (1860) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

–––––––––––––––––

Having been announced by a housemaid, James Clark Ross stepped into the blue-panelled drawing room of the Franklin household, the fortress from which the last decade’s search efforts for Franklin and his men had all been sent.

Lady Jane Franklin was waiting for him, wearing a wine-dark dress and a carefully-painted smile.

“Lady Franklin,” James said, all cold courtesy. It had been too many years since there was any warmth between them.

Lady Jane bowed her head very slightly in greeting, a reigning goddess acknowledging a mere mortal who had come in supplication. James swallowed back his anger.

“You are well, I hope?” he asked, instead. He knew how Jane could wield politeness as a weapon – had seen it in Hobart, and again in the long war of attrition she’d waged against the Admiralty that had led them both here: James Ross, hat in his hands, calling at last upon the long-suffering Penelope of the North. Turning her weapon in his own hands.

If James wished to board a ship back to the icy wasteland, to throw himself back into the search, it would have to be at this woman’s whim. The only ships that sailed to the Arctic anymore did so on Lady Jane’s dime and under Lady Jane’s direction. James had heard that there was to be but one ship this year – Sir Sutton’s old screw yacht the _Fox,_ under the command of Leo McClintock; if James intended to be on that ship, it would be because Lady Jane Franklin willed it so – there was no other way.

“We are well enough,” Lady Jane said. James supposed by “we” she meant to include the ever-present Sophia Cracroft who had surprised James by not being in attendance when he arrived that morning, given how she and her aunt seemed to act as one, these days; though James also wouldn’t have put it past Lady Jane to have adopted the royal “we” while he hadn’t been paying attention.

James swallowed. “I’m glad.”

“Well, do sit, Sir James,” Lady Jane continued, gesturing to the armchair beside her own. “And I do hope you are well also. My condolences, of course, you already know, but I would have you be reassured that I meant them most earnestly. We were so shocked to hear of it, and we share your grief.”

James sat as requested, and grasped the chair’s arms to steady himself, wishing that he had a glass of something strong to drink instead. “I am as can be expected,” he said, desperate to keep his voice even; James knew that four months on, he was still a poor fit for company. That was why he was doing this, after all.

Blessedly, Lady Jane did not inquire further into James’s health or his mourning. With a knowing look, instead, she asked him, “So, what can I do for you today? Since I hardly imagine this is just a social visit.”

Pulling from his pocket the well-creased leaflet, James offered it to Lady Jane, the words of the bold headline “Lady Franklin’s Final Search” already blackening the tips of his fingers with cheap ink.

“Ah,” Lady Jane said, taking the flier in her hands and reading aloud: “‘The Government having come to the conclusion that the fate of the crews of Her Majesty’s ships “Erebus” and “Terror” requires no further investigation on their part, Lady Franklin, in accordance with her sense of what is due to the lost navigators, is now fitting out an expedition at her own cost.’”

She looked up at James. “Surely you can’t disagree with my reasoning.”

James hastened to correct her misapprehension. “On the contrary, Lady Jane,” he said, “I would like to make a contribution.” He pointed to a later paragraph, meaning to touch upon the text that read:

_“Supported by the advice of those experienced Arctic seamen in whom she has every reason to confide, Lady Franklin makes this last effort to clear away the mystery that shrouds the fate of her husband and his crews, and possibly to rescue from their insulated icy abode among the Esquimaux, some of his younger companions who may still be prolonging a dreary existence.”_

His hand slipped, however, to the final sentence, until his finger rested over the place where Lady Franklin’s proxy, whoever he was, had printed her words,

_“…tender to the widow of the illustrious navigator that sympathy which his fame and her devotion must call forth.”_

Lady Jane raised an imperious brow. “You wish to be part of the subscription?” she asked. “You ought to have told us earlier – we would have loved to have had your name listed with the others; on the front page of course. Right after Sabine, perhaps.”

“I will make what contribution I can,” James said, “but that is not what I meant.”

Lady Jane smiled a false smile, as James had once known her to do when hiding her confusion; there was so little that was beyond her ken that when something did arise past her understanding, it rankled her.

It spilled out of James, then. “Allow me to join Captain McClintock,” he asked, feeling ready to slip to his knees. “I know the region better than any but him–” and John Rae, but James knew better than to speak that particular name here – “Let me help, please. Let me go.”

“You will not have a captainship,” Lady Jane said, warily.

James nodded. “I would not want one.”

“It will be up to Captain McClintock, then–”

“We both know that he will do as you say,” James interrupted.

Lady Jane accepted this with a small smile. “What would you have of me, then?”

“A letter,” James requested. “No more.”

One of the lady’s virtues, James thought, had always been her impatience for useless delay. Even as the words left James’s lips, Lady Jane rose to her feet and went to her desk, paper and ink already at hand.

Surely she wrote many such letters, for the work was done exceedingly quickly.

“There,” Lady Jane said, adding her signature with a flourish and blotting the page carefully. “That’s done.” She folded the letter into its envelope and handed it to James. “I trust you can deliver it to him yourself?”

“Certainly, Lady Franklin,” James nodded. “I thank you for your haste.”

As he tucked the letter into his waistcoat pocket, however, Lady Jane caught his sleeve. “James,” she said, voice low and quiet. “Why are you doing this? I know it’s not for my sake.”

Her question struck James deeper than he could have anticipated. “I could not live with myself, else,” was all he could say.

Lady Jane looked at him, and James suspected she could see the depths to which his thoughts had sunk, the will to find answers the only thing driving him forward anymore. If he could make no sense of Anne’s death, he would at least make sense of this, or die trying. James looked away, unable to bear the weight of Jane’s gaze. She had known him too long and too well; James regretted the things he’d told her, in those different days when they’d both been happy, the friendship they’d built in Van Diemen’s Land on the shared vulnerabilities of Jane’s battle against those who sought to tear down her husband’s career, of James’s exuberant emotions and hopeless affections for Anne, for...

“Will you promise me something, James?” Jane asked, softly.

James bowed his head. “I serve at your command,” he said.

When she spoke, Jane’s words were somber. “When you find him, bring him back to me?” It was not a request, this, but an order – James knew the difference. “Let me have something to bury.”

“I will,” James promised. He knew McClintock would have received the same instructions, and James was sure they would be followed. James would help as he was able.

Jane smiled the first real smile James suspected he had seen from her all day, for it was sad and it did not reach her eyes, but the touch of her hand on his arm was gentle and nostalgic. “Thank you,” she said.

“Of course,” James reassured, and Jane released him.

James stood to leave. He was almost out of the room when Jane called out to him one last time. “James,” she said, and when he turned back around, she was standing there, upright and stern once more. “I don’t wish to lose another friend.”

Something of their long-neglected and embittered friendship made James take pity, and with a swift nod, he acknowledged this last command. Nevertheless, his mouth would not permit him to make a promise he had no intention of keeping.

Instead, James left with all speed. There were preparations to be made, after all. He pressed a hand to his side, atop where Lady Jane’s letter to Leo McClintock lay, and felt his heart beating through the thick layers of cloth and paper. It was time for James to go make his inquiries for a posting – one last time.

# – III –

#### August of 1859

–––––––––––––––––

Here life has death for neighbour, and far from eye or ear  
Wan waves and wet winds labour, weak ships and spirits steer.

– from “The Garden of Proserpine,” (1866) by Algernon Charles Swinburne

–––––––––––––––––

The season for searching was coming to a bitterly cold end.

It had been two long years on the ice for James Clark Ross. He’d joined every sledge party that would have him, though the young officers refused to let him so much as haul his own gear. He’d marched off on his own in disgust, wanting to search – that was what he had come for, after all.

But now, after the message that Lt. Hobson had brought back in May, James knew it would be the last year he would spend in the Arctic. Captain McClintock had said that this note, left in the cairn that James himself had built, was to be the nail in Francis’s coffin, though it was the first concrete proof of him living, breathing, _hoping_ – but that was eleven long years before this moment. Anything might have happened between then and now; indeed, what horrors _had_ happened. James had been holding the paper and tracing his thumb over Francis’s signature when McClintock had made his decision, and it had taken everything James had left not to crumple the document in his fist in a flash of anger.

Certainly there was no more hope left, James knew. Still, he searched.

This day, on the dying edge of summer, James was supposed to make his last pass along the coast of King William’s Island before they all turned back, for good. Once the autumn storms returned in force, and the pack began to threaten _Fox_ once more, James knew they would have to retreat to the safety of the open waters, and the sea-way home. Still, the thought of turning his back on this land, and the traces of his friends that lay scattered across the shale, made James sink even deeper into despair. Surely, if he had a few more days, he’d find some sign, some indication of a path that would lead him to whatever remained of poor Franklin, of brave Tom, of Francis…

James gritted his teeth as the wind whipped and howled around him. He was too old for this, he acknowledged. Feeling every day of his fifty-nine years, James hiked further on up the slope of shale toward the crest, hoping against hope that, beyond it, he would be able to glimpse some further mark that he was on the right track. By the time James’s long strides brought him to the cliff’s edge, he was breathing heavily.

Once, James could have made fifty miles in a day – now he was lucky to cover ten. It frustrated him, made him frazzled, angry with his own limbs’ betrayal; made him push at his limits until he broke. Often, James could distract himself this way, striding ever onward until he’d warmed himself enough not to notice the pain, but he always paid the price, after. Like now, when the heat had seeped from his body, leaving him far more tired than he ought to be. Slowly, his breathing calmed, though he stood, now, on shaking legs. Before him, the unbroken pack ice stretched out to the north. They had only reached the very northern tip of King William’s Island, truly. Many miles yet lay to the south, unexplored. James turned his back to that vast unknown, for now; the stories Rae had told him whispered horribly along the back of his neck. Surely, to the south, he would find what he was seeking, awful though those answers might be.

James shuddered and looked down. Far below his feet, a wall of ice crashed into the shale, pushing up toward the top of the cliff in enormous frozen shards. And yet –

Peering intently at the line of stony shore that ran between the base of the cliff and the towering ridge of the pack, where the ice had receded slightly from the coast, James thought he saw a flutter of crimson. Something foreign, too bright, a color that _should not be,_ not out there. His heart leapt into his throat.

James forced himself to move slowly as he descended from the cliff’s edge and rounded the rise of rock until he reached a place where he might scramble down onto the shore. He hurried toward where he’d seen the flash of color and knelt down on the shale though it hurt even to bend his legs, let alone to endure the sharp rocks cutting into his knees.

It was a flag – or a part of a flag. A corner, carefully stitched along the red and white lines of what James could tell had once been a Union Jack. Looking closer at the careful thread-work, James wondered if he was mad to imagine that he recognized the stitching – it seemed to him very like Lady Franklin’s craft, the lines drawn clear and stubborn, with large, even stitches.

James looked around, hoping to find more of the flag, some answer to how such a thing had gotten to this place. At the first glance to his left, however, James realized that the cliff he had been standing atop was not a solid face of rock at all.

Instead, a dark opening towered over James’s head, a doorway into the earth. The dim light of day filtered only a few feet into the cave, but James could instantly see that it was exactly what he had feared to find, all this long time: a low pile of stones was heaped up there, the size of a fully grown man, and – at one end, facing him with eerie precision – there stood a headstone.

A grave.

James’s hands shook as he took off his heavy pack and made his way into the shadows, until he was close enough to read the text.

_Sacred to the memory of  
Sir John Franklin, Captain  
of H.M.Ship Erebus,  
died June 11th, 1847. _

_‘Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead.’  
Matthew, viii., 22._

James exhaled.

So this was it. The tomb of Lady Jane’s lost husband, the last resting place of a fellow polar explorer, the grave of a man whom James had known and worried over and searched for.

But it wasn’t Francis.

James felt unbearably guilty to even think it, but he was relieved.

Lady Jane would recover – James wasn’t sure that he would have.

Remembering his last conversation with Lady Franklin, James grimaced. He’d have to try to accomplish what Lady Jane had requested, what James had so earnestly promised back in the safety of the Franklins’ drawing room where he had sat opposite Lady Jane, unknowing that he would eventually find himself, alone, before this grave. But he _had_ promised; he’d have to try to bring Sir John’s remains back to her.

Gingerly, James began removing the stones that had been heaped into a careful mound. Beneath two or three layers of the piled-up shale, he found a layer of sailcloth covering a flat surface – the lid of a coffin. James swallowed. The wind whistled eerily in the dark entryway of the cave. Perhaps….

James couldn’t bring himself to disturb the sail-cloth, not yet. Instead, he moved back up toward the headstone, intending to remove more of the stones, but as he drew closer to the weathered wood, James saw that another message had been scratched across the surface, beneath the well-carved quotation from the book of Matthew. These new words were biblical too, but nothing that should have been written on any tombstone:

_And thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body,  
the flesh of thy sons and of thy daughters,  
which the Lord thy God hath given thee._

James recoiled. It was one thing to hear rumors passed hearsay through John Rae or even through McClintock’s men and their muttered reports of the bones they found – it was another to see the confession of such a thing branded upon Sir John’s tomb. He hastily drew back his hand from the stones that covered the grave. If the men had – 

Lady Jane would not wish to know.

_James_ did not wish to know.

He began to replace the stones, covering up what remained of Sir John, but something prickled along the back of James’s neck, and he turned to stare into the darkness of the cavernous chamber behind him. To James’s further shock, he spied something glinting in the shadows beyond the tomb.

Leaving aside poor Sir John for a moment, James approached the object, and turned it over with care. It was a sword – an officer’s decorative sword, much like the one that appeared in some of James’s own portraiture back home. James reached for the handle and picked it up as delicately as he could, when his hands still shook so. Despite his efforts, the sword’s tip dragged against some metal object and a sound rang out into the silence. Setting the sword back down, James peered into the gloom.

A series of small, circular objects, shining dully in the dark.

With mounting confusion, James realized they were buttons. Brass buttons from a royal navy coat, complete with crowned anchors, just like the ones he’d been shown by the Netsilik, nigh on a decade ago.

James rubbed a thumb against one of them. The surface was bitterly cold, and bit at his skin.

In the shadow cast by Sir John’s tombstone, James struggled forward with searching fingers, and found another button. A shiver ran up his arm, and he suddenly feared what he would find, here, in the dark. James retreated to the entrance of the cave, where he’d left his pack, before, in his hurry to read the tomb’s inscription. Now, he carefully removed a few items – a torch, a flint-stone. A moment’s work and the torch was lit, and James turned back to the part of the cave veiled in shadow.

James lifted the light high.

To his relief, the back wall of the cavern was smooth – unoccupied. No creatures lay in wait in dark corners; no man – no owner of the buttons – yet remained behind, huddled here in a final vigil for his captain.

In the flickering firelight, however, James saw that more buttons lay scattered across the surface of the shale. As he knelt down to collect them, James saw that the pattern they made was not random, but instead a line, pointing toward the back of the chamber. Hesitantly, James followed this line with his hand, watching the torchlight shimmer over the surface of each button. The end of the line was marked clearly with an arrow-head of buttons, pointing back – to what?

James stepped closer and saw that the back wall of the cave was not the smooth dead end that he had thought on first glance. Behind a thin ridge of rock lay a dark doorway, into which James’s torchlight would not shine. At its lintel, there lay yet another button.

A clear sign.

What else was James to do? He had come this far. He could not turn back.

Taking a deep breath and squaring his shoulders, James Clark Ross entered the tunnel behind the tomb.

At first, the passageway was long and low – James had to duck his head on occasion, though his back protested, and a taller man would have had to walk bent over for many steps. As he progressed further into the dark, he realized that there was a warmth down in the earth. Soon, it became too temperate for his heavy Netsilik-style furs, and James was forced to disrobe down to his shirtsleeves and waistcoat, piling his outer layers into the thin bag that he’d brought with him. Still, the absence of the biting Arctic cold was welcome – for more reason than one. James found that his legs ached and complained less often as he continued further down the passageway, and though the daylight quickly faded away behind him, James’s spirits rose. He tried to resist the temptation of hope, the idea that such warmth might mean that this was a place where a man could safely hole up, survive the worst of the Arctic winter, perhaps several winters...

At last, the ceiling began to rise gradually higher, and then suddenly there appeared to be no ceiling at all, only darkness. James straightened and lifted his torch high. Far, far up in the gloom above him, the cavern’s ceiling seemed rounded like a dome. James squinted at it; the flickering light played tricks with his eyes, but he believed he saw patterns there. Scrambling up a slope to get closer, James realized there were paintings spanning the enormous space of the roundel, spiraling out from the center of the chamber in dizzying circles. _Perhaps the Netsilik?_ The images were beautiful to James’s eyes: leaping animals, bears and foxes and seals; and curving shapes like icebergs. But a second glance showed also an animal with a long neck, too long for a bear’s, but like nothing else James had ever seen. Other creatures appeared on the edges of the light, skeletal and slender, and they disappeared when James blinked.

_A thing that eats on two legs and four, a thing made of muscles and spells…_

James stepped back down to the floor of the cavern. They were only paintings, he told himself. No more than the same fantasies that decorated the ceilings of grand papal rooms and royal apartments the world over. Grotesques, born of the mysteries of the Roman darkness, there – perhaps the same specters were born here, too, in the shadows of the polar night.

It was not reality. James told himself this.

James tried to put the paintings from his mind, and focus on the reason he’d come. The relics, the trail that spoke of some poor lost soul, perhaps, _perhaps_ – well, perhaps a survivor. Even Lady Jane had thought such a thing might just be possible. James scanned the round cavern-chamber once more for any sign.

Beyond this room the cavern trailed off in two different directions – left and right. There were no relics visible upon the sandy floor of the cave, not from where James stood. No indication of his next direction.

James thought back to the orientation of the cave’s entrance. If the path he’d taken down to this chamber had been relatively straight – and he’d thought it had been – then he’d entered the cave from the north, going south. That would mean that the left-ward path would lead him east, and the right-ward, west.

East must be the right way, James thought. He was so close to the western edge of King William’s Island; the sea lay not far off in that direction. He remembered, also, something that Dr. Hooker had told him once about the geology of the worlds under the earth, something based on the writings of Mr. Lyell: that a shallow cave was safer, less likely to crumble in and crush an ill-equipped explorer. Indeed, the path to the west seemed to slope down dangerously fast. Hesitantly, James began to pick his way down the path to the left, heading east – he thought. The first few steps of the left-hand pathway were smooth and shallow, as the walls narrowed in. A light sweet scent hung in the air – fresh and clean, like the sea. James felt his spirits lift.

Just as he had begun to leave the high rounded ceiling and its grand paintings behind, however, James heard a sound behind him. He whipped around, eyes wide and staring into the darkness.

Moving as quietly as he could manage, James edged into the central chamber once more, keeping his back to the wall. Was there someone in here with him? Some _thing?_

Something crunched under James’s boot. Glancing down, James saw several white shards glimmering in the torchlight. He knelt, and saw that it was – or rather, had been – a tea cup. One fragment, part of the delicate handle still attached to the shattered body of the cup, remained; James picked it up, tenderly. The pattern was one he recognized, with its delicate blue and white florals; it was from a set he and Francis had chosen for their officers so many years ago, before they left for the Antarctic in ’39.

“Captain?”

James startled upright at the first human voice he’d heard in days. “Hello?” he called out, lifting up the torch. “Who’s there? Where are you?”

From behind him, James heard the same voice again, painfully familiar: “Here.”

James spun around, frantic. Panicked. But there was only more darkness.

“Is there something I can do for you, sir?”

James closed his eyes. He was hallucinating. There could be no other explanation for this familiar voice, all trimmed politeness arrayed over a rough city-accent. James had heard that voice every time he’d come to _Terror_ to visit Francis, those same words spoken following an offer of tea from that very tea-set.

“Sir?”

James opened his eyes, and beyond the range of his torch, there was a shape in the darkness. When he lifted his light, the shape disappeared, but when he let his arm fall, the figure became just barely visible. A shade, an echo of a memory?

“Jopson? Is that you?”

“Yes, sir,” came the prompt reply. James narrowed his eyes, and traced the well-known figure of Francis’s devoted steward, visible only when James looked sideways: his dark hair, his fair skin, his ice-blue eyes, now gaunt and hollow. James shivered. The boy was practically transparent, just a glint in the darkness, but he moved, yet, like a living thing.

James wanted to run from this apparition, shut his eyes to it, but he didn’t dare. “Jopson,” he asked. “Are you – are you alive?”

“No, sir.”

That was clear enough, but James shuddered to hear it.

Jopson coughed discreetly, and drew closer to James, who fought the instinctive urge to shrink away. “Let me take you back, sir,” Jopson said, “You should go back.”

“I can’t,” James said. “I must go on.”

Jopson sighed, put-upon. It was a sound James knew well enough from the Antarctic, when James’s antics would induce the same noise from Francis and from his steward alike. The memory almost warmed James to recall, until the reality of Jopson’s death crashed down upon him once more. The boy hadn’t yet seen thirty when he’d left with Francis on this last fateful trip. James had met his father once, when the man had come to collect his son’s last earnings from the Admiralty in 1854. James tried to forget the man’s grieving face as he lifted his eyes once more to the shade before him.

But by this time Jopson’s spirit seemed to have resigned itself to James’s stubbornness, for he pointed down the long, dark stretch of the westward tunnel, toward where some further light glimmered low in the darkness. “Follow it, sir,” he said.

James felt the pull – to explore, to know.

He turned back toward Jopson. “Are you sure, Jopson? Are you certain there is nothing I can do for you?”

But Jopson only smiled, in that same half-sad way he’d always done, and replied, “I got you, Captain.”

Then, to James’s horror, the bones of Jopson’s hands were suddenly visible through the skin. He glanced up at the boy’s face to see it disappearing before his eyes: gaunt skin, then bone, then nothing at all. And then, in between the time it took for James to blink, the specter was gone entirely.

The darkness seemed to close in around James.

Surely he’d imagined the whole thing? This couldn’t be possible. And yet–

James shook himself. Heart still in his throat, he started down the right-hand branch of the cave. Even if this had been no more than the product of James’s traitorous imagination, he had a bearing, now, and he would follow it.

To the west, now. To whatever end.

This time, James kept one hand on the wall as he went, unwilling to surrender himself to the shadows and whatever men – living or dead – dwelt within them. The stone of the tunnel-wall was rough under his fingers, and the torch, in his other hand, set the ceiling aglow high above him, though the floor was steeped in black and seemed to drop quickly, making James stumble often. His legs complained of it, and James dreaded what the return journey would bring.

After some time – minutes, perhaps, though hours were at least as likely – James realized that the stones beneath his finger-tips followed a sort of pattern: dips and whorls and indentations. He turned to look at the wall – for his eyes had been fixed on the path ahead – and to his amazement, there were delicate bones running through the rock. Small animals – fish, their ribs picked clean, their eyes staring sightlessly. James followed them forward in amazement, watching the tiny skeletons in their frozen movement down the tunnel, same as he. Fossils, like those Dr. Hooker had so marveled over, once. Captain McClintock had talked of finding fossils up here in the Arctic too, James remembered. It was eerie, but somehow marvelous: these creatures trapped forever in the stone, swimming onward to the center of the earth. A record of a time long, long past.

James kept on, and the noses of the fish began to point down, further into the depths. James glanced ahead.

In front of him, the passageway dropped rapidly away in a scramble of sloping boulders, edges worn soft by time.

Feeling very much too old and weary for such things, James prepared to climb down, shifting his gear to balance his weight as he freed one hand for climbing, and gripped the torch more tightly in the other; it would have to do.

James was almost to the bottom when he placed his foot carefully on the next step and it shifted unexpectedly under his feet. James lifted himself quickly back up. Peering down at the stone with his torch held aloft, he saw that what had seemed a flat surface of limestone was in fact blanketed with scraps of paper.

With a trembling hand, James reached for the nearest, and saw familiar spidery handwriting – Franklin’s. All crossed out, illegible.

Beneath it, there was a page of James Fitzjames’s elegant curled script with its wayward t-crosses. Spelling out something about magnetism.

Next, a printed page, torn from a book – from a bible. In amongst the close-printed text, one verse was underlined, _“I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places, wherever thou goest; for I will not leave thee.”_

Further down, a sheet of ledger-paper, all-blank….

Another book page, not the bible this time, nor even English – it was poetry, James saw, in Greek, and his mind supplied the words piece-meal from his school-boy days: ὡς γὰρ ἐπεκλώσαντο θεοὶ δειλοῖσι βροτοῖσι ζώειν ἀχνυμένους… _for thus the gods spin out the thread of fate for mortal men, miserable upon the earth, that they should live in grief…._

“Sir James.”

James had thought that he was prepared to hear more voices from the shadows at the edges of the tunnel; still, he jumped. He knew this voice all too well. The north-country gruffness that had comforted James through the agonies of his uncle’s disastrous mission in ’29….

“Thomas?” James asked. It couldn’t be. He turned around and lowered his torch.

Another spirit flickered before him, here and there. It had to be Tom Blanky – his beard grown wild, his eyes hard as flint.

“Aye,” the apparition said, and James felt a pang of grief.

“God, Tom, what happened?” he begged, voice half a sob of frustration. “What happened to you?”

Tom’s voice was low and quiet but all too clear. “We spent three winters without a thaw.” He said. “Rough ice coming down from the north – bloody cold. We shouldn't have waited to start walking. By the time we got to it, there was a….” Blanky’s voice went abruptly silent.

“Tell me, Tom,” James begged.

Blanky’s mouth was a crooked line, his displeasure obvious. “A spirit.”

“A spirit?”

“Like an omen,” Blanky’s ghost corrected. “Coming for us.”

James frowned. “I don’t know what that means – I don’t know how to prepare for what’s ahead, Tom, I don’t know how to help you.”

“Go on,” Blanky said, and his arm pointed down into the darkness ahead. “That’ll do for me.”

“I want to help you,” James insisted. “Are you sure I can’t do something more?”

“Aye, but there’s no telling what lies ahead,” Blanky said, a warning in his tone, as though he did, in fact, know more than he was telling James. “Be careful now.”

James reached out toward Blanky’s other hand, thinking to reassure him that there must be something that could be done, but to James’s horror, his hand passed right through Blanky’s form like a ship traveling through mist.

Tom Blanky’s eyes widened, and then the edges of him began to blur. James reached for him again, desperate, but Tom’s shape swirled away from his reaching fingers like candle smoke.

“Be careful now, James.” Tom said once again, and then he was gone.

In a daze, James stumbled onward. The ceiling of the cavern seemed to lower in on him, and the floor dropped even more precipitously, until he was forced to drop his head and hold his torch to the side as he stepped around ribbons and ripples of rock, clinging to the edges.

James placed his hand on the wall to steady himself, and found it abruptly wet. He drew his hand away immediately, but he was so startled that he lost his footing. The ground under him was suddenly slick with water, and James slipped several heart-pounding meters down. This sent a cascade of small stones crashing down ahead of him, and James heard them splash in a pool of water, unseen, below him.

Though he managed to catch himself before he hit the water, his torch was not so lucky. It fell from James’s hand and went sputtering into the pool, throwing up sparks and smoke and then all was darkness.

Black darkness, deep and impenetrable. All around him.

In the dark, sounds were amplified – the shift of James’s foot sounded like an avalanche, and the rocks that he sent clattering into the water made the same sounds James would expect of a ship sinking into the sea.

And then thin, ragged holes began to open into the void – not light so much as images painted on the darkness, illuminating nothing.

The spirits had come back.

Not prim young Jopson or beloved Thomas this time – no, these were instead shades that had haunted James for years and years: the poor souls who had been lost on the agonizing march to Fury Beach; sailors who had perished under James’s command during his trip south; men he’d allowed to suffer and die in his own efforts over the years to reach Franklin and Francis. McClintock’s men, whom James had pushed harder than they could endure in the last two years. Every mistake James had ever made, every rash decision, all had come crawling out of their graves. The ghosts shouted and laughed around him. It was not a good laughter; it came mingled with curses. James closed his eyes against the sound, but it was as dark behind his eyelids as it had been when his eyes were wide open, and twice as loud.

He wrapped his arms around his knees, and pressed himself against the cave wall.

Maybe if James stayed very, very still it would all go away.

After what felt like hours, the spirits and their cruel noises began to move away from him until only the echoes remained. James lifted his head from his hands, but the darkness had not lessened – he could see nothing at all.

Something touched the back of James’s neck, and he flinched violently. The next touch fell to his cheek, and James realized it was just a drop of water, for it ran down to his jaw and wet the fabric of his collar. Shifting slightly toward the wall, James found a place in the darkness where these drops fell quick and close. James caught the rapid drops of water in his hand. He’d thought it simple rainwater, somehow, but when it pooled in the center of his cupped palm, the water began to glow bright like St. Elmo’s fire. Wondering, James held both of his hands out in front of him, and the light off the water lit up every surface it touched with an eerie aurora. Greens and blues danced on the ribbed walls of the cavern.

Using this light, James looked over the part of the cave in which he now found himself as best he could. The steep-walled pool still lay below him, and its dark surface glimmered in the blue light. James knelt close to it, wondering how he might get around it, for the tunnel seemed to continue onward before him, but there was no dry path for James to follow.

A bit of water spilled from James’s hands into the pool, then, and to James’s astonishment, the dark waters all began to glow as well.

In the greater illumination, James at once realized that he was not alone.

A dark figure stood further down the shore.

James scrambled away. It was immediately apparent that this was no ghost, like the ones he’d seen before. The figure, hooded in black, did not disappear when James looked at it straight on. A second fearful glance told him it was likely a woman, the hem of her pale green skirts the only part of her not covered by her black cloak.

“Please….” James said, not knowing what he was asking. But the figure obligingly revealed one pale hand, and pulled down the hood of her cloak, revealing dark hair and blue eyes flashing in the eerie light.

James gasped.

“…Anne?”

The figure looked back at him. “James,” she said, in a voice that was achingly familiar, though the tone was hollow and empty.

“Anne – Anne, dearest,” James said, and hastened to her side, already reaching out a hand. “I thought you were…”

But when James’s fingers met Anne’s, she was as cold and motionless as marble. James took her hand, still, but although she smiled softly when he did so, it was as if _she_ could not feel _him,_ so little was her reaction.

“God, Anne,” James whispered. “Let’s go, let’s get out of here, we need to get you warm.”

Anne only shook her head. “Oh James,” she replied. “It’s far too late for that.”

“But why….” James stuttered. “Can’t I take you home, Anne? Aren’t you here with me? I can feel you.” He wanted to take her in his arms, but could not bear the thought that she would remain unmoved by it.

Anne’s smile turned sad. “I’ve already fallen off the edges of this story,” she said.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that my time has passed.”

James swallowed against his distress. “What could I have done differently, Anne? What can I do now?

“There was a moment–” Anne admitted. “Another path you could have taken.”

James thought back to the left-hand tunnel leading eastward, the way he had almost followed before a sound had called him back. The scent of the sea, the blue of Anne’s eyes.

“Tell me,” James begged, unwilling to believe it, his voice ragged. “Tell me how to save you.”

“I’m afraid you can’t, dearest,” Anne replied. “I’m sorry.”

“I’ll turn around, I’ll go find you–”

But Anne stopped his words with her own. “No, that path is closed now. There is a different journey meant for you, my love.” Anne said. “Follow me.” She turned and began walking away from James, who rushed to follow her along the shore.

Around a sharp corner, the waters continued and the shore fell away sharply. A small boat was moored there, beside the glistening wall of the cave – a coracle, like the kayaks James had seen the Inuit make from bone and hide.

“Come, James,” Anne said. She had already boarded the little vessel, and picked up an oar. “We have further yet to go.”

James stepped gingerly behind her into the boat, which had hardly settled from its rocking before they were off, sailing out into the dark.

The glowing lights in the water followed them as they went, swirling around Anne’s oar. Looking back, James saw that the shore from which they had come was already receding into darkness. James shivered, then realized that he was truly cold for the first time since he had entered the cavern.

“Put your coat on, my dear,” Anne told him gently. “It’ll only get colder from here.”

James looked at her, the fall of her hair against her cheek, her skin so pale it might be frozen; she seemed entirely unaffected by the cold, though her green gown and dark cloak would hardly have kept her warm through an English winter, let alone an Arctic one. Still, he trusted her knowledge and pulled out his fur great-coat, though it warmed him enough merely lying over his knees, for now. This done, James looked out at the pool ahead and realized that the cavern was narrowing inward once more, with great tumbles of rock and broken stone having crashed into the water. As they reached this place, Anne lifted her oar out of the lake and lay it across her lap, and yet their boat continued on, pulled forward by some unseen current.

The fallen rocks only grew larger and more dangerous-looking as they went on, until the pool became a river in truth, rushing between rough walls so close that James could reach out and touch them.

Anne turned back, then, over her shoulder. Her forehead was furrowed in concern. “Steel your heart, dearest,” she said.

“For what –” James began, and then their little coracle scraped against some shoal or rocky shore under the water and their journey came to a halt. He peered past Anne into the shadows ahead.

On a shelf beside the stream, there lay a man. Or what was left of one.

Though still wrapped in Inuit-style furs, largely concealed from view, the man’s right hand reached out over the rock. It was nothing but bones. At the skeletal wrist, James saw the glint of a bronze button, the dark blue of navy-issue fabric.

James scrambled out of the boat and fell to his knees. Beneath the hood, a glimpse of a skeletal grin caught James’s eye and he looked away as quickly as he could; still, the awful image seemed to press itself forcefully upon his mind. He glanced down at the man’s torso, the tops of the ribs. His hands shook too violently for him to dare touch the bleached white bones, but he pulled aside the fur collar to see, placed beneath the edge of the man’s other wrist – which was crushed and broken, the left hand gone entirely – there lay an intricate metal-work case, the size of a miniature prayer-book. To his utter horror, James realized that he knew what lay inside: he recognized the silver-smith’s patterns, the flowers and sea-waves and the tiny etched sailing ship than James himself had chosen out of a pattern-book. It was a daguerreotype case, the one he’d given Francis, the last time he’d seen him. _Something to remember me by,_ James had said, laughing off Francis’s gentle mockery about James’s vanity, that he would give Francis a daguerreotype of himself. But Francis had gazed so tenderly at the image, after their laughter had ended and when he must have thought James wasn’t looking, that James had thought it a passable gift. And here it was, the little silver-work case. As much of a gravestone as James could expect for Francis to receive.

James drew back in shock and despair. Someone was speaking; he eventually realized it was himself, repeating the word “no,” again and again.

He’d come all this way, knowing it might end like this, but he’d still _hoped._

He should have known better.

Then, from the darkness at the sides of his vision –

“James?”

James closed his eyes. He wanted to scream. After everything, this was too much – that voice, the one he’d longed to hear. How many times had he heard his own name spoken in that soft Irish burr? How badly had he failed to appreciate it until Francis was gone?

“No,” he said, as though it would make everything end.

“No, James?”

“No, I can’t bear it.”

“I’m sorry,” the voice said.

James sighed. “It’s not fair, but it’s not your fault.”

“Let us look one another in the face, please, James,” the voice begged.

Swallowing his grief, James allowed his eyes to open. The glow that had lit up the cavern had faded somewhat, and along the edges of the darkness, James could see the traces of yet another ghostly figure: the worn captain’s uniform, the high collar, the scruffy beard, that familiar unhappy frown – Francis Crozier, or what remained of his soul, lingering in the dark earth. He looked gaunt and sad.

James dared not touch him, fearing he would melt into smoke like poor Tom Blanky’s ghost had done. Instead, James took in as much of Francis as he could manage, as though to glut himself on how Francis’s dear brow was creased in worry, how his eyes glittered in the gloom. They ought to be blue, James thought, but there was no color to Francis, not anymore.

“Francis, how did it all end up like this?” James asked.

Francis – his spirit – shook its head. “I have no answers, James.”

“James, dearheart,” Anne said quietly from behind him. She sat lightly upon the gunwale of the boat she’d steered, face expressionless, absently worrying the pale green silk of her dress between her fingers. “My dearest,” she said. “It’s time to go.” 

James hated this place, hated the darkness and the ever-increasing horrors. And yet the thought of turning away and leaving held no appeal for him.

“What if I–” he said, but Anne held up a hand. 

“You cannot stay, James. It is not yet your time.”

“How can you possibly say that?” James hissed. “I _want_ to stay.”

“James,” Anne sighed. “You don’t want that. You cannot live here.”

It was the bitterness of circumstances that made James speak the words he said next, but that bitterness sounded very much like anger. “Well,” he bit out. “I can _die_ here, then.”

An emotion flickered across Anne’s stoic face. “You _cannot_. You _will_ not,” she said. “Or have you forgotten that there are others who still need you? Our children, James. You would take their father from them?”

James shot back, “What good am I as a father if I can do nothing but burden them with my own grief?”

“You must learn to be a better one,” Anne said fiercely. Her words tore at James’s heart like a physical wound.

“Anne,” he said, flayed open. “I would rather live only a few days in the darkness here, with you and with Francis, than live the rest of my lifetime without the only two people I’ve ever loved.”

There was a sudden silence. James realized how much of his heart he had revealed, with Francis’s spirit still there, hovering on the edges of his vision. Terrified, James risked a glance and saw that Francis looked stricken, his eyes wide.

“If you do love him,” Anne said, then, “there is a way.”

James turned back to her, panicked. “No, Anne – I, I – that’s not –” he started to say. But James could not lie, not about this. He looked at his beloved wife and spoke as true as he could manage. “Anne, I love you. I would never do anything to hurt you. I promised myself to you and I meant it.”

Anne looked at him almost tenderly. “Oh James, love, I know that. But you love him too, yes? I’d thought that might be the case.”

Nodding slowly, James tried to understand. “I – What did you mean, _there is a way_?”

“A long tradition of this place,” Anne said. “There is a promise made to those who come, seeking a beloved, a husband or a wife. If the lost loved one is still a wandering spirit, unsettled like Francis – well, if you can walk back to the surface, out of this underworld, without turning back to look behind you, the one you love is permitted to follow.”

“There was a myth… a story from ancient Greece….”

Anne nodded. “Orpheus,” she said.

“And Eurydice,” James finished.

Anne nodded once again. “So if you love him, you can save him – or at least, you can try.”

“Surely I can save both of you?” James pleaded. “This doesn’t mean– this could never mean I love you any less, Anne. You must know that.”

“Love, I do know that,” Anne said. “But no, you cannot save me.”

“Why can I not?” James begged. “You can follow me, please, you must try–”

“No, the thread of my fate ends here.”

James wanted to run, to fight, to scream at God. The helplessness threatened to overwhelm him, and it was only the fear of frightening those he loved away that kept James from dashing himself against the wall. Instead, he covered his face with his fists and made some inhuman noise until his chest hurt with it.

When at last James opened his eyes, he knew there were tear-tracks running down his cheeks, for Anne reached out as if to brush the tears dry, but James pulled away. “I’m sorry,” he sobbed. “I’m sorry, I can’t.”

He didn’t dare meet Anne’s eyes. A few more shuddering breaths left his lungs before he could speak again.

“What if I stay?” he asked. “When I die – won’t I become a spirit too? Would that be so bad?”

Anne’s voice was cold as ice. “I will not allow it, James. There is no purpose to such a thing,” she said. “Not when you could be happy.”

“How?” James asked. “How could I possibly–”

“You could be happy with Francis,” Anne insisted. “And I would be happy knowing you are loved.”

James grew aware, once more, of where Francis still stood, a ghostly image at the corner of his eye; he feared to meet Francis’s gaze too, now.

“Dearest,” he said, instead, to Anne, reaching for the safe, familiar love he’d always had for her from the moment they’d met. “I can’t lose you.”

“You will see me again,” Anne said. “And until then I want you to be cared for.”

Heart beating fast in his chest, James struggled for words. “You can’t know– how– Anne, I’ve– we’ve never talked. I’ve never said…”

“Then talk now,” Anne insisted.

James allowed his eyes to slip over to where he knew Francis would be, at last. “I–” he said, terribly unsure of how Francis would react. He worried that his heart had conflated their long years of friendship with the desires that lay perhaps only in James’s heart, and not in Francis’s. He wanted Francis back, alive and well, no matter what, but the idea that Francis might not even be able to bear their old friendship, now that Francis knew, was a nightmare that taunted him. “Francis, I–”

“Please,” Francis’s ghost begged. “Go on.”

James swallowed against the fear in his throat. “I– I love you, Francis. I have loved you for years. I never stopped loving you.” Their early days danced through James’s mind – his admiration for Francis, when they’d both been young; all the joys and fears of the Antarctic against the backdrop of Francis’s courage and constancy; how James had resolved that perhaps, someday, he’d find it in himself to tell Francis how he felt. And then Francis had left with Franklin, and it had been too late. “If– if we make it home, nothing has to change, I promise, but I’ve missed you so much, Francis. Please come home with me. Please let me lead you back.”

Francis seemed unbearably sad. His lips looked as though they were trying to form words, making the same shapes that James knew his own lips had made just moments before, but there was no sound. At last Francis drew down his brow in frustration and commanded, “Hear me, James.”

James nodded.

Francis then asked, very carefully, “You’re certain of this?”

“I am,” James said. This was the chance for James to remedy past mistakes; whatever he thought of James’s confession, Francis ought to know that someone loved him – that _James_ had loved him, missed him, grieved for him past endurance. That was what mattered.

After an interminable moment of silence, Francis spoke at last. “I feel it,” he said, drawing very close to James so that his voice was a warm whisper, full of promise. “I feel it also, James.”

Something cracked apart like broken ice in James’s chest. “Do you mean it, Francis? I–” his voice shattered. “I wish,” he said quietly. “I wish I could hold you.”

“James.” Francis said, his hands hovering over James’s arms as though to embrace him, though James knew such a thing was impossible. “If we make it out of this,” Francis offered, “perhaps– perhaps we can…”

“We can,” James reassured, past reason and desperate to comfort Francis. He turned to Anne. “Are you absolutely certain this will work? And you will promise that there is some after-place where I will see you again, even if I leave here, now, with Francis?”

Anne nodded solemnly.

James searched her face for any sign of unhappiness. “And this is what you want, love?” he asked, more softly.

“Yes, James,” Anne replied. “Please.” It hurt James to hear it, even as he was giddy from the notion that Francis felt something for him in return. The impossibility of these opposing emotions had him twisting away to steady himself. The journey ahead, that was what would matter. If he did not win Francis’s resurrection, it would mean nothing at all, any of it.

When James turned around to look at the river and the tunnel leading back out of the cave, he found that the stream had dried up until the river-bed was nearly empty – just a trickle of glowing water running along the bottom. The little boat lay beached upon a sandy shore.

“Can we simply walk out, then?” James breathed. “Truly?” It seemed far too good to be true.

“It’s a long march, James,” Francis said, warily.

James looked at him side-long. “I know, but promise me you will try, Francis. We will leave this place, together, and then we can go home.”

“If we can go home, we will,” Francis said. “We shall try together.”

This was enough of a promise for James. He smiled, and restrained the impossible desire to press Francis’s hand and kiss his cheek.

James turned, instead, to Anne. “I’m going to have to find a way to say goodbye to you, aren’t I?” James said, allowing himself to voice what lay ahead in the hope that it would lessen the burden of the task. It did not.

“Yes, dearest,” Anne confirmed. “But no farewells yet – I can lead you some small part of the way back.”

James exhaled in relief. “And you will follow?” he asked Francis.

“I will,” Francis replied. “Always.”

Turning back to Anne, James set his jaw firmly. “Onward?” he asked.

“Onward,” she replied, and stepped forward. When James moved to follow, she turned around to face him. “Remember – keep your eyes on me,” she said. “Francis will not be able to speak to you, but you must trust that he is there.”

James agreed, and they set off.

As they walked along the bottom of the riverbed, James spoke to Anne about anything and everything, knowing this would be his last chance. He apologized for leaving the children, over and over and over again, until Anne begged him to stop with a cold hand pressed to his arm. He asked Anne what he could do for her, in the world above, what he could do to comfort family and friends, to honor Anne’s memory. He heard Anne speak of the world as she’d seen it, learning things he’d never known or understood. James tried to hoard up all of her words like specimens to be filed away and studied and admired. They’d had so little time.

And all through those long minutes and hours they talked in the darkness, Anne would glance occasionally backward over James’s shoulder, and every time she would nod, a silent promise. James kept his eyes forward, only forward, ever on Anne, holding himself stiffly with need to do this correctly. He could not endure the alternative.

Finally, they reached the place where the pool had once been. Now, it was just a shallow puddle, only a few inches deep; James walked through it to the opposite shore, sending glittering droplets of blue and green splashing up onto the walls.

“I can take you only this far,” Anne declared. “You must continue on your own, and remember – you must not look back.” 

James nodded. 

“He’s still there,” Anne promised one last time, and James desperately wanted to believe her.

Anne tilted her head so she was looking past James, who once again pressed down the instinct to turn around. “Take good care of him,” she said, and whatever answer Francis supposedly gave must have been enough, because Anne returned her focus to James.

Anne stepped close and kissed him, just once, slow and chaste. Her lips were deathly cold; James closed his eyes in a vain attempt to stop the tears that threatened to pour down his cheeks. 

“I’ll be waiting for you – both of you,” Anne said, and for the first time there was warmth in her voice.

When James blinked back his tears enough to look at her, he saw that a golden light flickered over her skin and she looked almost alive for just a moment. She smiled, first at James, and then over his shoulder, where she’d promised that Francis was. Then she pulled up the hood of her cloak, and the darkness swallowed her up once more. 

James rubbed a hand across his face. He wanted very badly to sink to his knees and grieve this familiar loss all over again, but could not risk losing a moment’s focus.

“Francis?” He spoke the name into the tunnel just to hear the echo, knowing he would not get an answer. Indeed, he heard only the name repeating on and on, off into the distance.

It was time for blind faith – misplaced though that had been in James’s life so far.

But he had no choice, now.

James placed his hand firmly on the wall to his left, fixed his gaze ahead of him, and walked into the darkness, hoping beyond hope that Francis was somehow, silently, following. Within moments, he reached a corner around which he was forced to turn, and then there was no more light at all.

James walked on in total black. The only sound was his own ragged breathing and the uneven sound of his own footsteps.

It could have been hours, days, in that silent darkness. James grew more and more tired, stumbling over the uneven floor beneath his feet, and more than once falling hard on his hip as he tried to climb past blockages and boulders. After the worst of these tumbles, he worried he’d be unable to get up, or that he might have fallen too far from the tunnel wall to find it again, and thus might be led down some wrong direction, never to reach the surface. But the thought of Francis’s smile, the light in his eyes as he’d said _I feel it also_ – it brought James round. Holding that memory in his mind, James found the strength to scramble upright, to reach the wall, and to pull himself onward. The long, lonely walk began again. James’s legs were in agony, and his heart was not much better.

At last – at long, long last – James saw a glimmer of white light ahead of him. As he approached on unsteady feet, it grew brighter, and James realized he had reached the point where the cave was lit dimly by sunlight filtering in through the entrance, through the tomb chamber. Forgetting everything, James began to turn back around, desperate to see daylight upon Francis’s beloved face, but he caught himself at the last moment.

He could _not._ Not when he was so close.

Instead, James closed his eyes firmly, placed his hand back on the wall, and put one foot in front of the other until the icy chill of the outside air told him he was once more close to the doorway.

Then, with care, James opened his eyes just enough to guide himself into the tomb chamber. He spared no more than a glance for poor Sir John and his lonely resting place, but instead kept his eyes on the wall of ice towering up in front of him. Heart in his throat, James stepped out just past the edge of the cliff’s face, until he was no more below ground by any definition.

“Francis?” he asked, hoping – hopeless.

There was no answer. If this had been a trick, a trap, there was nothing now that James could do. He’d have to turn around and face whatever walked behind him. Even if it was nothing at all.

Feeling like his soul was creeping out of his mouth with fear and despair, James turned around.

But there stood Francis Crozier, blinking in the weak sunlight. This was not the spirit James had seen in the depths of the earth, dressed in the rags of a uniform, so clearly nothing more than an echo of a life already lost. This was Francis whole, and real, and – somehow – alive. Unclothed, as though born again.

James was speechless.

He reached for Francis, and, wonderfully, his hands did not pass through Francis’s skin, but rather rested where he placed them on Francis’s bare shoulders. James gazed into his dear face, taking in his sharp blue eyes and the familiar turn of his brow. Francis shivered, skin cold but entirely alive under James’s fingers.

Breathless, James pulled him into an embrace. Under his fingertips he could feel Francis’s heartbeat, fast but steady.

“Francis,” he whispered, over and over and over again. “Francis, _Francis._ ”

Francis shivered even harder in James’s arms, and James hurriedly scrambled for his pack, left behind in the corner of the cave entrance so long ago, pulling out what clothes were there and helping Francis dress as quickly as he could while still pressing his hands to Francis’s flesh as often as he dared, desperate to warm him.

When Francis was at last wrapped in James’s clothes and warm furs, James cupped Francis’s face in his hands. “Francis,” he said, for the joy of saying it, the sheer delight of having reason to say it. “I want to – may I– ”

But Francis was already nodding in agreement and reaching for him, and so James brought their mouths together at last, not waiting a second longer. Francis’s lips were cold, and James tried frantically to press his own warmth into them, breathing his hope into Francis.

Slowly, Francis began to move beneath his touch, kissing him hungrily. James’s heart soared, and without intending to, he let a small desperate sound slip from his mouth. Yet Francis pressed even closer, stealing the exhalation from James’s lips and leaving him gasping.

When at last James pulled back, Francis looked much better – his coloring high, with a blush of heat and embarrassment spreading across his weathered cheeks just as a small, slightly bashful smile appeared on his lips. “ _Christ,_ James dear,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I’ve missed you beyond words.”

James laughed, feeling like Francis had reached inside him and dislodged whatever horror had been frozen around his heart these long years. He had waited far too long for this, not knowing what it would be like to show Francis how he loved him, not knowing how very lovely it would be to hold him close. “Are you here with me in truth, Francis? How is it possible that I can feel you?” James asked, running a thumb over Francis’s lips in wonder.

There was life in Francis’s cheeks as he looked down at himself, and James wanted to kiss every inch of him, starting with those lips, again. “I– I think I am indeed here, somehow,” Francis said. “I suspect I would find myself struggling to believe this was real, were our surroundings any more hospitable.” His teeth were chattering.

James found himself laughing even as he pulled Francis closer. “Then I’ve never been more grateful to be in this place,” he said. “With you.” If seeing Francis down there in the darkness had been like viewing a daguerreotype image, thin and flat and false-colored, then seeing Francis now was something akin to watching a statue come to life.

“I–” Francis said, his shy smile reappearing at last. “James dear, I love you. You must know that.”

The words made James’s heart feel over-full with warmth. “I think I could live forever, if I could hear you say that to me every day,” James admitted.

“Then I will do so,” Francis promised.

James had no choice but to kiss him again.

# – IV –

#### September of 1859

–––––––––––––––––

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,  
That brings our friends up from the underworld.

– from “Tears, Idle Tears,” (1847) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

–––––––––––––––––

Once again, James Clark Ross found himself stepping from the polished parlour of the Franklin house into the elegant blue drawing room. James felt almost scruffy in comparison, having only days ago returned to England and been able to wash off the grime and exhaustion and pain of his last voyage. They’d made good time back across the Atlantic, arriving less than a month after they’d left Baffin Bay.

So now, it was time for James to report to Lady Franklin about the events of Captain McClintock’s search mission. She already knew some of what they’d discovered – information had already been sent ahead to London, so it was not for James to inform Lady Jane of her husband’s confirmed death. No – James had agreed to be the first to attend upon Lady Jane because he had some words of comfort: a promise kept.

Though James had been too desperate to have Francis safely ensconced on the _Fox_ to pause for anything, Lt. Hobson had generously agreed to take a few men and go back to the tomb to retrieve Franklin’s bones, which Francis reassured would be there, though he advised that no one ought to be permitted to open the coffin. James had furrowed his brow and had not pressed Francis further.

Once Francis had found his words, once they’d been safely out in the open air and the sunlight, he’d told James some of what had happened. James knew that there were things Francis was keeping from him: the worst of the horrors, James suspected. It was no matter – James wanted only to comfort Francis however he could, and in any case, he had felt it best to simply wait and listen and be present when Francis woke in the night in the cabin they shared on the _Fox,_ so that Francis might curl into his arms and press his face against James’s chest while James ran gentle fingers through his hair.

Thus it was without any real answers that James made his pilgrimage to the Lady Franklin, but he didn’t dare leave the task to anyone else who might suggest that Lady Jane attempt to speak with Francis herself, when the man needed rest and peace and care. As it was, James had feared to leave Francis alone at the townhouse even just long enough for him to make his appearance here, and they would both be off for Aston Abbotts together as soon as it was all over. James had pulled every string on which he could get his fingers in order to ensure that the Admiralty would leave Francis entirely alone.

It was with these thoughts racing through his mind that James arrived, at last, in front of Lady Jane Franklin, who seemed entirely unchanged by the past two years.

“My deepest condolences, Lady Jane,” James said. “I am sorry that we had to send you such tidings.”

Apparently, Jane had borne up well under the news, for she now offered him a pale smile. “We cannot pretend it was unexpected,” she agreed, though her voice was sad, and James acknowledged the truth of it with a single nod.

“I came as swiftly as I could,” James continued. “For you ought to know that we were able to bring something of him back for you to bury.”

Jane hid her surprise swiftly. “I thank you, Sir James, for keeping your promise,” she said, and under the formality, James thought he saw in her some grief and some acceptance, in equal measure. James suspected that he had been right – Lady Jane would recover from this.

As James had expected, Jane had a number of questions for him. He answered every one dutifully – if not truthfully – telling her of the first two years that Captain McClintock and his crew had spent searching, and then, when it came to the miraculous recovery of a single survivor, James spun a subtle lie about the depth of the cave in which he had found Francis and the state Francis had been in when James had found him, all of which allowed for James to preserve the appearance of being sane.

Once the sunlight had shifted down the wall and the afternoon had passed into an autumn evening, James began to feel restless. Lady Jane soon paused in her questioning, allowing James to break in.

“I must get back to Francis,” James said. “But if ever you have need of anything, you have only to ask me. I cannot thank you enough for helping me obtain the opportunity to bring my dearest friend home.”

Jane smiled, very slightly – there was something _knowing_ to the expression, James thought, though what she knew, James didn’t dare guess. “I wish you and Francis all the best, James,” she said.

Discretion being the better part of valor, James bowed his head once more, and made his goodbyes.

He had retreated to the parlour and was almost to the door when a voice called out “Sir James.” James turned, and saw that Sophia Cracroft stood in the doorway to the study, poised as ever.

“Miss Cracroft,” James said with a nod.

“You are well, then?” she asked, a note of what sounded like true concern in her voice.

James nodded. “And you?”

“Still adjusting to the news,” Sophia admitted. “I have to ask – it’s true, isn’t it? That you’ve brought Francis back?”

“It’s true,” James said.

“And he’s well, also?”

“As well as he can be,” James allowed. He didn’t dare suggest that Francis was well enough for company, though Francis now seemed to be in better health than James, who had spent much of the journey across the ocean abed, recovering from the pain in his legs. James had tried to sooth Francis’s nightmares, and Francis had worked to stop James from overtaxing himself even further. Thus they had spent many days avoiding all other company together. _A fair trade,_ Francis had judged it.

“I wrote to him,” Sophia replied. “When I heard the report. Just in case.”

James bit back a riposte that Francis could hardly be expected to reply to any letters, even under these best possible conditions. “If you give it to me, I will ensure he receives it, Miss Cracroft,” he offered instead.

Sophia smiled politely. “Oh that’s not necessary – it’s already in the post – but thank you, Sir James,” she said. “As long as – he’s staying with you, yes? Then I know he’ll be alright.”

“You would be welcome to visit,” James offered. He couldn’t deny her that – couldn’t deny Francis that – much as it galled him. Sophia had always been lovely company, but it hurt to think of Francis near her now. James hadn’t thought himself a jealous man, but perhaps he’d have to reconsider that notion.

But Sophia demurred. “No, no,” she said. “Besides, I’m needed here – well, not here, per se… Auntie’s thinking of another trip to America, soon.”

“Best wishes for your travels,” James replied, thinking that he himself would be content never to set sail ever again.

“It’s not my place to ask,” Sophia said, “but you will take good care of him, yes?”

Though his first instincts were uncharitable, James allowed himself to imagine the task of caring for Francis – waking up with Francis in his arms; kissing better any of his aches and pains; making the most of the years they’d have ahead of them, now. James would ensure that Francis never wanted for anything, ever again, and James could not imagine a commission he’d ever taken with more joy. He might well be jealous of Francis’s affection for Sophia Cracroft in the past, James realized, but James himself was the one who would be able to share in Francis’s future.

It was this thought that allowed James to offer Sophia a friendly smile in return, and promise that yes, he would take very good care of Francis, indeed.

# – V –

#### December of 1859

–––––––––––––––––

He takes his seat upon the cliffs; the mariner  
Cries in vain, till heaven smiles, and the monster  
Is driven yelling to his caves beneath Mount Hecla.

– from “To Winter” (1783) by William Blake

–––––––––––––––––

The first snow to fall at Aston Abbotts that year had already almost melted away, but that did not stop James Clark Ross’s enthusiastic band of children from declaring the day a snow day and disappearing off into the grounds on their own small adventures. Young James was back from school for the break, and Annie’s tutors were no match for James the Younger and Annie both, so they had been permitted time off from their studies to wander out to the lake and beyond, leaving a scattering of prints in the dusting of snow that yet lay upon the grass.

So much had changed in the two years that he had been gone, James thought to himself. His eldest son was almost of a height with him, at fifteen. With any luck, young James had inherited some of his mother’s family’s height, and would tower over them all, someday.

James pondered this as he followed the footprints out toward the lake. After a long day in his study preparing a manuscript for Captain McClintock, he had been tasked with finding his eldest son and daughter and – hell or high water – persuading them to come in for dinner before it was well and truly dark. Edward Bird had happily agreed to stay on while James and Francis settled into the rhythms of life here, and was already proving himself equal to the task of cajoling James away from his desk to attend meals with his children. James could admit to himself – now – that it would help his health were he to eat and drink and rest. It helped that there was now a clear reason to put in the effort; the dinner table no longer felt quite so empty with Francis there to catch James when he stumbled into a tale that still hurt to tell, and James could finally sleep again, with Francis warm in his arms.

These thoughts kept James company as he meandered through the grove, searching for his two eldest. He eventually found them playing at explorers, wading into the edge of the pond, young James’s trousers rolled up to the knee despite the cold, and Annie’s skirts likely beyond repair.

“Dinnertime!” he called, smiling at their token protests.

As they all approached the house, James saw that a warm light was glowing from the high windows of the orangery that Annie had been slowly turning into a greenhouse. With a word of reassurance, James sent the children on ahead to prepare for dinner, and went to investigate.

James saw, upon further inspection, that the orangery itself was darkened, and the lamp-light was, in fact, filtering in from the nearby sitting room. There, James found Francis seated on the chaise lounge just inside the door of the sitting room, with a blanket over his legs. In his lap, Andrew, now a toddler, was sleeping peacefully; nearby, one of Andrew’s books was lying open to show an illustration of a ship at sea.

James shut the door as quietly as he could manage, but Francis’s eyes still leapt up to meet his own. James put his finger to his lips, a promise that he’d be entirely silent, and stepped closer.

“He’s already had supper, anyway,” James whispered, and helped Francis lift the boy ever-so-gently out of his lap so that Francis might slip away without waking him. Once James had placed Andrew back on the chaise, Francis tucked the blanket around the sleeping child, and brushed Andrew’s hair back from his eyes.

James suspected his heart might simply stop beating from how lovely it all was.

Instead, he smiled and held out a hand for Francis, and led him away from the sitting room. They only made it as far as the vestibule before James turned back and took up Francis’s other hand as well, pausing in the hallway to admire his rumpled house-coat and the way his hair was sticking up in the back.

“A good evening so far?” James asked.

Francis made a grumbling noise without any apparent displeasure behind it. “Well enough,” he said, voice a little rough in a way that made James wonder if Francis had briefly fallen asleep as well, perhaps.

“I missed you,” James said. It had been all of a few hours.

Francis’s face softened into a tender smile that made James feel helpless and happy and light. “I missed you too,” Francis replied.

James stepped closer to Francis and brought his hand up to cradle Francis’s elbow. “Don’t go too far,” he said, knowing that the depths of his irrational need for closeness bled through in his voice. But Francis merely brought James into a loose embrace and smiled even more.

“You’re the one who left the house, James dear,” Francis said.

“Then I won’t leave again without you,” James promised, teasing.

Francis moved even closer again, guiding them until James’s back rested along the hallway-wall. “Don’t,” Francis said, earnestly. “Don’t leave.”

“Never,” James swore, and then Francis was kissing him, his lips warm and demanding. James melted into Francis’s mouth with a happy moan. It was still such a novelty to have Francis like this, in his arms, bringing every one of James’s youthful daydreams gloriously to life. His heart beat faster as Francis smiled against his lips, allowing James the opportunity to run his tongue along the charming gap between Francis’s front teeth.

Francis broke the kiss, then, and pressed James more firmly against the wall, cursing James’s high collar for hindering his access to James’s neck as he kissed along the line of James’s jaw instead.

Just as James was beginning to contemplate dragging Francis upstairs to their bedroom, he heard voices from the dining room. “Father! Supper –” one voice called, and then “Francis!” and another shouted “Captain James!”

James dropped his head to rest against Francis’s shoulder and exhaled heavily. “Damn,” he muttered.

But Francis simply laughed, low and content, and rubbed James’s arms. “Later,” he whispered into James’s ear, his voice deepened with intent. James blushed.

“Later,” he agreed, and pulled Francis toward the dining room before they could distract each other any further.

At the doorway to the dining room, James took in the tableau before him.

James Jr. was dutifully helping set out supper – though, admittedly, James saw his eldest son sneak a book of poetry under the table and was certain they’d lost his attention for the rest of the evening. Nine-year-old Thomas was apparently mesmerized by Edward Bird showing off his tattoos – meandering patterns of ill-advised Inuit designs from one of their earliest trips to the Arctic with Captain Parry; or rather, what Thomas could see of said tattoos, anyway, where Edward had rolled up his sleeve to the elbow. James smiled at the boy’s expression of amazement, and turned to see Francis rushing to catch Annie as she all but flung herself into Francis’s arms.

James covered his mouth to hide his laughter while Francis bore up under the weight of a young teenager.

Annie nuzzled into his collar for a moment, and then pulled away. “For you,” Annie said, threading something through Francis’s button-hole. James leaned in to see, and realized it was a flower – the yellow bloom frozen in its rich color.

Francis smiled at Annie, briefly and helplessly. “Thank you, my dear girl,” he said. “It’s beautiful.”

Annie grinned and darted away. Taking the opportunity to step close, James reached out and straightened the stem of the flower. Annie must have secreted it away from the lake-shore, for James hadn’t known she’d had it. Though, looking closer, James reconsidered the origins of the little blossom – how Annie had found an Arctic poppy at Aston Abbotts, James had no idea.

James looked up into Francis’s eyes. A mournfulness still lived there, but it had always done so, as long as James had known him, and it seemed no worse than usual at that moment. Nevertheless, James felt that the smile must be returned to that beloved, weary face. “It suits you,” James said and basked in the cautious delight of Francis’s answering grin.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Author’s Note:** Though is is technically a fill for the prompt “Orpheus and Eurydice AU,” I was also inspired by another one of Henry’s beautiful suggestions: the idea that, in a post-canon AU, “Crozier interacting with the Rosses’ kids would be nice but not a requirement.” I’m sure this isn’t quite what you meant by that, Henry, but I hope ’t will serve! 
> 
> **Source Notes:** In order to bring something “spectral” to the ghost characters in this fic, the dialogue spoken by Jopson and Blanky consists entirely of the words and phrases that these characters used in the show; Francis’s ghost, here, does the same – until the moment that James kisses him, that is. (This is also why Francis’s ghost can only say “James” and not “James dear.”) I wanted there to be some barrier of communication, some veil between James, in the land of the living, and the ghost characters, in the land of the dead. Anne, of course, is the exception to this, but she’s less of a ghost and more of a psychopomp. 
> 
> **History Notes:** As I’m sure you already know, Henry, the opening line of this story – what James is writing – comes from a postscript to James Clark Ross’s will ~~that you yourself transcribed~~ that I found through a post that you made; other readers can find it on your blog [here](https://handfuloftime.tumblr.com/post/190485229285/two-human-sympathies-concentrated-in-one-james), which post also has (modern) floor-plans for Aston Abbotts.
> 
> Technically, the show timeline of Ross’s efforts to rescue the Franklin crew seems incompatible with the birth of young Thomas Ross in 1850. I’ve kept to Thomas’s real age here; we might imagine that this Ross actually made three rescue attempts: one in 1848-1849, another one around 1850 (as seen in the show) and then this third one in 1857-1859 (which follows the historical timeline of the McClintock expedition.) This would mean Thomas may have been born while James Ross was on his second search attempt.
> 
> The scene with young Annie Ross and Francis’s herbarium specimens was inspired by these [two](https://indifferent-century.tumblr.com/post/622022929872551936/tttack-croziers-herbarium-collection-of) [posts](https://indifferent-century.tumblr.com/post/622022956247400448/tttack-fragments-of-croziers-southern) by @tttack. The flower that Edward Bird brings to her at first is a white lily – this comes from the line, “Lily white and poppy red” in the song “Flowers” from the musical _Hadestown._ Of course, the “poppy” in this story is not red but rather yellow – the Arctic poppy in the final scene. The color change represents this story’s break from the original mythology, that James Clark Ross is successful where Orpheus is not. 
> 
> McClintock’s _Fox_ was in fact originally owned by a man named Sir Richard Sutton (cf. _The Voyage of the 'Fox' in the Arctic Seas, A Narrative of the Discovery of the Fate of Sir John Franklin and His Companions_ (1859) pg. 6.) Not to be confused with Richard Sutton, who, you know, plays Sir James Clark Ross in _The Terror_ (2018).
> 
> When James first goes to visit Lady Jane, the “Lady Franklin’s Final Search” flyer that he brings with him is [this](https://recordoffice.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/dscf0359.jpg) [one](https://recordoffice.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/dscf0360.jpg). The great men of polar exploration are, of course, represented on the subscriptions list, but on the second page, you can spot some other familiar names, including, but not limited to, “The Hon. Mrs. Fairholme,” “Joseph D. Hooker, M.D., F.R.S., G.S., &c.,” “Miss Georgiana Hornby (Leamington),” and “William Coningham, M.P.” 
> 
> The scholar James is remembering when he recalls Dr. Hooker telling him about geology is Charles Lyell (1797–1875), whose _Principles of Geology_ (1830-1833) is discussed by John Bridgens and Henry Peglar in Dan Simmons’s novel (pg. 368-371)
> 
> The fragments of paper that James finds just before the appearance of Blanky’s spirit are quoting two sources. The first is a modification of Genesis 28:15 that appears in Francis Crozier’s funeral speech for Sir John in the show; the second, the Greek quote, comes from Homer’s _Iliad,_ Book XXIV, lines 525-526. James’s translation of the Homeric Greek is my own. 
> 
> Everlasting kleos to @[kaserl](https://kaserl.tumblr.com) and @[ariadneolorin](https://ariadneolorin.tumblr.com) and @[jamesclarkross](https://jamesclarkross.tumblr.com) for helping me to sail this ship safely into its harbor!


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